The Last Global Ritual (by Mariam Mojdehi)
Every four years, the World Cup transforms the world into something that feels increasingly rare: a shared public ritual. Identity reduces itself to color and a ball. Neighborhoods gather in parks and bars, and for a few weeks the borders that organize our politics soften into something else—a global public assembled around a game.
As an Iranian American, I experienced that promise—and its contradictions—up close. When security barred fans from bringing the pre-revolution Lion and Sun flag into the stadium, I watched arguments unfold both inside and outside the gates. Suddenly, a flag became more than a flag. It raised a question I couldn't shake: How do you support players who have carried enormous personal risk while refusing to legitimize a regime that imprisons and executes its own citizens for acts of everyday protest? How do you register dissent at the scale of a stadium, where identity is flattened into symbols meant to unite millions at once?
These questions quickly expand beyond Iran. What does fairness mean when geopolitics inevitably shape the tournament? Who are we cheering for when national teams also embody histories of migration, diaspora, and colonialism? What does international identity look like today—beyond passports, beyond flags, beyond the nation-state itself?
The World Cup has always been full of these contradictions. FIFA's history of corruption exists alongside immigration crackdowns, militarized borders, and staggering global inequality. Yet it also remains one of the few events where the Global North and South occupy the same stage. In an era increasingly mediated by algorithms, drones, and chatbots, there remains something profoundly human about billions of people sharing the same emotional landscape, however imperfectly.
Perhaps the World Cup is one of the last expressions of cultural globalism—not as policy or institution, but as imagination. Less NATO or the United Nations than Benetton's Colors magazine or peak Esprit: an imperfect but compelling vision that people from everywhere might still see themselves, however briefly, in the same picture.
The question isn't whether these contradictions can be resolved. It's whether we can learn to inhabit them together.
In Los Angeles, that question feels especially urgent. In just two years, the Olympics will once again ask this city to host the world. Will we return to these same conversations about belonging, protest, public space, and representation? Or can we imagine new ways of gathering that leave room not only for celebration, but for complexity?
The World Cup offers no easy answers. But it reminds us that stadiums, parks, neighborhood bars, and city streets are more than venues—they are civic spaces where a global public can still see itself, argue with itself, and, however imperfectly, imagine itself together.